Deja owie

Almost August now, and on certain days there is a hint of fall in the air, early in the mornings. Also a hint of weirdness.

Down in Indianapolis, for instance, the Colts have barely begun training camp, and already Kevin Durant has taken them hostage.

This elicits an appropriate "Um, what??" from the four or five of you who still read the Blob ("Four or five! Get him!" you're saying), and also provides more evidence that the Blob's faculties have made another prison break. But stay with me here.

See, Kevin Durant strained his calf in the NBA playoffs. You remember that, right?

Then, after sitting out a bunch of games, and with the Warriors about to be exit-ramped by the Raptors, he returned to the lineup.

Then he tore his Achilles, an injury that could well cost him an entire season.

Now, the Blob isn't saying for sure that what happened to KD is coloring the Colts' thinking process right now. But Andrew Luck has a strained calf. He strained it way back in April, apparently. And yet he's still not practicing, and everyone is saying exactly the same things they said about Luck's shoulder at exactly this time in 2017, and, um, well ...

Well. We know what happened in 2017, right?

And who's to say they all don't have the live stream of KD rupturing his Achilles on a continual loop inside their heads, and also 2017 looping up there somewhere, too?

So even though Luck is telling everyone not to freak out, freaking out is definitely an option here. Because he's also saying the calf is still bugging him. And head coach Frank Reich is admitting there's definitely some pain there, a rather startling admission considering the Colts tend to be very Kremlin-like about these matters.

So. Here we go again, right?

Or, not. Hopefully not.

Cooked books

Say this much for the mucketies who run the United States Soccer Federation: They never met a losing hand upon which they couldn't double down.

It's not just their ongoing lack of appreciation for the national side that butters their bread, i.e., the United States Women's National Team. The women comprise the best women's soccer team in the world, and as such are indisputably the face of soccer in the U.S. All they request is they be paid like it.

The USSF, however, remains remarkably consistent about this. Which is to say, it remains remarkably ungrateful for its prize entity -- one that, among other things, diverts attention from a U.S. men's side whose dial-tone mediocrity is remarkably consistent itself.

And so the latest response from the USSF, ahead of the USWNT lawsuit accusing it of gender discrimination: A letter and "fact" sheet from USSF president Carlos Cordeiro that claims to show the women are already paid more than the men. What's most significant about it is not the misdirection and false equivalency it puts forward, but its utter tone deafness.

Or perhaps the USSF thinks that, on the heels of the USWNT covering itself with glory at the World Cup, this is the absolute best time to tell to the ladies shut up and quit whining.

(Also, "Get back there behind the men where you belong," presumably.)

Cluelessness this profound does not come down the pike every day, even in an America whose leaders daily establish fresh benchmarks for cluelessness. But it's compounded by the squirrely numbers the USSF uses to makes its squirrely case, which takes disingenuousness to new heights.

For example: The lawsuit being pushed by the USWNT says its game checks are smaller than the game checks for members of the USMNT, on a dollar-to-dollar basis. But the USSF's "fact" sheet throws up all sorts of smoke and mirrors to obscure that. It factors the women's club salaries in the National Women's Soccer League into the equation, on the premise that the USSF contributes to the NWSL. By that reckoning, the women make more in guaranteed money.

Of course, the USSF doesn't factor in what USMNT players make playing for various clubs Europe, an option that's not really available to the women. This, shall we say, skews the numbers.

Not that the USSF cares. It may be long past time for Cordeiro and the boys to stop digging, but clearly they haven't gotten the message yet.

No, sir. You'll get that shovel, presumably, when you pry their cold, dead hands from it.

History's witness. (So-called).

And now a couple of lines from Mary Chapin Carpenter's tribute to 9/11 workers, "Grand Central Station" -- which, like another song by Carly Simon, Our Only Available President probably thinks is about him:

Tomorrow, I'll be back there, workin' on the pile
Going in, comin' out, single file ...

To which OOAP no doubt would respond: "Yeah, I remember those days. Tough. Very, very tough."

This on account of what he said the other day, while signing the first responders' bill Jon Stewart basically shamed Congress into passing. Seems Our Boy Donny was down there with 'em all, too -- although, charitably, he said he didn't consider himself a first responder. But he was right there with 'em, by God. Like, a lot. Not his fault no one remembers him being there, or that there's not an iota of evidence he ever was.

Those, after all, are facts. And who needs facts in OOAP's America?

No, in OOAP's America, he's Forrest Gump, present and accounted for at a bunch of America's signature moments. This includes a lot of America's signature moments in sports, too, although OOAP has thus far been too modest to bring them up. But by golly, the Blob remembers that time when ...

* ... Our Boy got sick, very, very sick, had to go to the hospital, even. And then Babe Ruth stopped by, and he promised to hit a home run for him. And he did it!

* ... Our Boy was playing defensive back for the Oakland Raiders, and Terry Bradshaw threw that one pass, and it bounced off Our Boy's helmet and went right to Franco Harris! The Immaculate Reception! Our Boy couldn't believe it! And then when they said it actually bounced off Jack Tatum's helmet ... wrong. Very, very wrong.

* ... Our Boy was playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers the year Jackie Robinson broke the color line, and there was this one game where everyone was booing him and calling him names, very bad names, and Our Boy went up to Jackie and put his arm around him! See, he's no racist! And never mind that everyone says it was Pee Wee Reese who did that ...

Wrong. Very, very wrong.

* ... Our Boy made the block that Bart Starr followed into the end zone for the winning touchdown in the Ice Bowl. Boy, it was cold that day! You can't believe how cold it was! And then Jerry Kramer took credit for the block, even though everyone knows it was Our Boy. So terrible of Kramer to do that! Such a liar!

* ... Our Boy scored the winning goal in the Miracle on Ice game, and also played goalie, making all those great saves in the last 10 minutes. U-S-A! U-S-A! What a night! And so what if everyone remembers it was Mike Eruzione who scored the winning goal, and Jim Craig making all those great saves? Fake news!

I mean, who ya gonna believe? Our Boy, or your lying eyes?

Hey, look, it's that one guy

That Bicycle Race ended along the Champs Elysees yesterday, and the Blob will give you four guesses who won. These first three, however, do not count:

1. Pee Wee Herman.

2. You, on your 26-inch Huffy with the cool headlamp.

3. Lance Armstrong, posing as "Chance Le Chance," a humble farmer from Varennes who never heard of these PEDs of which you speak, nope, huh-uh, don't even knoooow what you're talkin' about.

Give up?

Well, if your fourth guess was Egan Bernal, a 22-year-old Colombian, you win. Bernal didn't win a single stage of That Bicycle Race (real name: The Tour de France), but so what? He won anyway!

And he's not only the first Colombian to win the Tour, he's the youngest winner in 110 years. That's a whole century plus a decade to you and me, kids!

So here's to him. And here's to you, because now you can win your next bar bet by saying "I bet I know who won the Tour de France and you don't."

Egan Bernal. Remember the name. Your next free drink hangs on it.

Criminal un-tent

And now we check in with the En Eff Ell, where training camps have barely opened and already the usual amount of foofery has broken out.

It seems the Shield -- ever diligent about making sure its athletes are shining examples of rectitude, as long as it doesn't involve domestic violence -- has suspended New York Giants receiver Golden Tate for four games. This is because he and his wife are trying to get pregnant.

Yes, you read that right.

Apparently Tate began taking a fertility drug a few months back, not realizing it contained an ingredient banned by the league. When he discovered it, he says he dutifully reported it to the league, his coaches and Giants GM Dave Gettleman, warning them he might potentially fail a drug test because of it.

To most normal people, this seems like the sort of stand-up behavior that would be rewarded, and perhaps even celebrated. But, nah. The NFL suspended him anyway.

Tate is appealing, and hopefully he'll win. In the meantime, we can all be thankful our favorite professional sport is so committed to giving the public a clean and ethical product.

Or whatever.

Your Moment of Cynicism for today

It's been 10 days now since Dan Le Batard did a little truth-telling on the radio, flaming his bosses at ESPN for muzzling the talent from speaking out about presidential racism and such, unless of course they can hide it behind some sort of Sportsball camouflage.

Everyone (including the Blob) figured the bosses would slap down Le Batard with all due haste for deliberately raspberry-ing company policy. And yet ...

And yet, it's been 10 days. And Le Batard is still on the air. And there's been nothing but crickets from management.

Compare that to how swiftly ESPN cast Jemele Hill into outer darkness for speaking some truth of her own, i.e., that Our Only Available President is a white supremacist. Surely its glaring silence vis-a-vis Le Batard couldn't have anything to do with the fact his show is the most wildly popular entity on ESPN's radio platform. Could it?

Nah. That can't be it. Surely that's just one of those, what you call it, amazing coincidences.

Heh.

Me time

NFL training camps opened around the country this week, and you know what that means.

No, not the beginning of your annual agony over whether you should draft C.J. Spillers for your fantasy team, because you just know he's got one last great year in him, and this could be it.

On the contrary, C.J. can wait. This week it's all about what Woody Allen allegedly once said, and how it seems to be more true than ever.

Remember? Eighty percent of life is just showing up?

Come with us, then, to northern California, where the Raiders shiny new acquisition, wide receiver Antonio Brown, arrived for his first training camp with the silver-and-black. Of course, he didn't just arrive. He Arrived.

As in, he took a tour at dawn of California wine country in a hot air balloon, before literally materializing out of thin air (or at least, thinner air) at camp.

It was the ultimate Me moment  by a guy who plays the NFL's ultimate Me position, and it's nothing new these days. Arriving at training camp has become performance art for some of the Shield's more, shall we say, expansive egos -- a troubling trend for back-in-the-day grumplesteins who remember when players used to just drive into camp, haul their bags inside and flip a coin to see who got the bottom bunk.

It wasn't a production, back then. It wasn't a whole Look At Me thing. You just showed up and got to work running gassers until you threw up and jumping when Coach said jump, and generally being a good teammate because, after all, there's no "I" in "team."

There is, however, in "arrival."

And so here came Antonio Brown, descending from the clouds to save the Raiders. And on the other coast, here came Jaguars defensive back Jalen Ramsey, arriving at camp in an armored car full of cash. And so it goes.

One wonders what wondrous arrival will happen next ...

FOXBOROUGH, Mass., 2032 -- Tom Brady parachuted into training camp today with a basketful of TB12 energy supplements, which he distributed to the assembled media. "They're fortified with air!" Brady said, explaining that his new dietary regimen consisted of not eating anything because "you can obtain all the nutrients you need for a healthy lifestyle simply by breathing good air!"

Or:

NEW YORK, 2032 -- Eli Manning arrived at training camp today in a tricked-out lift van, emerging with a titanium walker he said was a spoof of all the media types who've said he's too old to be effective anymore. Then he theatrically flung the walker aside and marched inside under his own power, using only a cane.

Or:

TAMPA BAY -- Jameis Winston sailed an authentic 18th-century pirate ship into the Buccaneers training camp today, waving a cutlass and a bottle of rum and wearing Jack Sparrow eye shadow. He said he got the idea from LeVeon Bell, who flew an F-16 into the Jets training camp and landed it at midfield, leaping from it dressed in a flight suit and Tom Cruise's Maverick helmet from "Top Gun."

Yeesh.

Kid meets history

It is a summer of milestones here in America, from One Small Step For Man to murderous lost children in California. Fifty years since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon; 50 years since Charlie Manson unleashed savagery on two warm August nights in L.A. The yin and yang of the human experience, if you will.

And so why wouldn't baseball, which holds fast its milestones like few other endeavors, join in the milestoning?

Come out to southern California again, then, for a baseball game between the Los Angeles Angels and the sadsack Baltimore Orioles, once again the worst team in baseball by every measure. The O's are already 33 games out of first place in the AL East, with two months left in the season. They're 30 games south of .500. Yet last night they did something that hasn't been done in baseball in, yes, 50 years.

Or rather, a young man named Stevie Wilkerson did.

It's OK if you don't know who Stevie Wilkerson is. Hardly anyone does. He's an outfielder for the O's who, at 27, has played only 83 major-league games. He's played 424 games in the minors, where he began this season with the Norfolk Tides of the Triple A International League. So far this summer he's played 67 games for the O's, with two home runs, a triple and 10 RBI.

Oh, yeah: And one save, as of last night.

That's because the O's dragged out their game with the Angels for 16 innings, until the  Halos finally said, "OK, fine. You win." The final was 10-8, and due to the score and the lateness of the hour, Stevie Wilkerson wound up on the bump as a relief pitcher. In so doing, he became the first position player since 1969 to record a save.

Think about that. Half a century of baseball games, half a century of players leaving their footprints (or not) on the ancient game, and it's a kid from Roswell, Ga., who's spent most of his career in the bushes upon whom history chooses to land.

So like history, that. So like baseball.

Incompletion

ESPN rolled out its latest stat geek porn the other day, a ranking of which college football programs are Quarterback U., which are Linebacker U., which are Wide Receiver U. and so on. Much slide-ruling and pocket-protectoring went into it, apparently, and it was all quite lovely.

Well. Except that it was kinda incomplete.

Because of logistical constraints or square-rooting-of-the-hypotenuse time limitations, see, ESPN decided to only judge the various categories based on the last 20 years. This was fine, and didn't detract from the legitimacy of the rankings, but it was a little like teaching an American history course that begins in 1980. So much stuff gets left out.

And so ESPN's ranking of Quarterback U.'s, for instance, was OK as far as it went. But, metaphorically speaking, it left out the Revolution, the Civil War, a couple of World Wars and several other wars. Plus the Founding Fathers, the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison and, you know, guys like that.

Which is why a Texas A&M and a Fresno State made the ranking, but Purdue did not.

This seems odd given that Purdue already has two quarterbacks in the Pro Football Hall of Fame  (Bob Griese and Len Dawson) and another who soon will be (Drew Brees). Also, there is Jim Everett. And Mike Phipps. And Scott Campbell. And Mark Herrmann.

None of them, of course, played in the last 20 years. So I guess they don't count.

Jesse Palmer and Chris Leak, however, do.

These are two guys who played at Florida in the last 20 years, and are presented as evidence for why Florida made ESPN's QB list. Yes, that's right: Jesse Palmer and Chris Leak are mentioned, but not Steve Spurrier, who won the Heisman Trophy in 1966 and is the quarterback who kinda-sorta got the whole Florida quarterback legacy rolling in the first place.

And have we mentioned Alabama?

The Crimson Tide came in at 33rd on the rankings, largely because they haven't exactly been QB rich in the last two decades. But, again, so many pages get left blank when you do that. You never get to mention various other 'Bama QBs, like, oh, I don't know, JOE NAMATH. Or, you know, KENNY STABLER.

Yeesh. It's like writing a history of golf that begins "And then Tiger Woods showed up."  Or a history of the Colts that begins "The Colts arrived in Indianapolis in 1984. And then Peyton Manning showed up."

After which there is no mention that there was this other guy who also played quarterback for the Colts, but not in Indianapolis, and not in a time America either remembers or regards as relevant. Yet this guy was kinda good, too, apparently.

Unitas was his name. Something like that.

And a child shall ...

Well. You know the rest.

And so, as an antidote to Grownups Behaving Like Children -- lookin' at you, Mai Tai Guy! -- the Blob offers this as evidence that sometimes kids make better grownups than grownups. Someone treating a baseball hit into the stands as just a baseball hit into the stands! Imagine that!

Oh, and Mai Tai Guy?

You're still a tool.

The No-pen Championship, Part Deux

Raise a pint of the plain this a.m. to Shane Lowry, who is not from Northern Ireland but still an Irishman, and who won the British Open by six strokes Sunday at Royal Portrush in the North. It was Lowry's first win in a major, and he won it on his home island if not his homeland. So here's to him.

And here's to Royal Portrush, which finally showed the teeth a respectable Open Championship course is supposed to show in the final round.

Wind and rain lashed the course in proper British Isles fashion Sunday, and everyone properly suffered -- even Lowry, who cruised to his six-stroke win even though he carded a 1-over 72. This was only right, because suffering is frequently the essence of golf, and its oldest championship just as frequently sets the tone for that.

Which brings us to poor J.B. Holmes, who was the epitome of golf suffering on Sunday.

Holmes is pretty much a PGA Tour ham-and-egger, a guy who'll win you an occasional Greater Hog Wallow Slim Jim Open but never the marquee events. The gods, however, chose to smile on him briefly over the weekend.

He led by a stroke after one round. He was still tied for the lead after two rounds. Even going into Sunday, he was tied for third and just six strokes adrift of the lead.

Then the Open Championship said, "OK, chum. That's quite enough out of you."

In all that wind and rain, Holmes dropped like a brick dropped from a great height. After making bogey or worse just five times in the first three rounds, he did it 11 times in 18 holes Sunday. At one point he followed a triple bogey with a double bogey. He finished with an 87 and wound up in a tie for 67th.

Third to 67th in 18 holes. Now that's some classic Open Championship stuff.

Even worse, he was playing with Brooks Koepka, the best golfer in the world right now and a man on his way to making history by becoming the first player in PGA history to finish fourth or better in all four majors in a calendar year. And who spent most of the afternoon figuratively tapping his foot and looking at his watch as Holmes, a notoriously slow player, agonized over every one of his 87 shots.

Can't imagine a more uncomfortable good walk spoiled than that. Which means the Open's work was most well done.

Speaking privileges

Fort Wayne rolled out the green carpet for the Dan Le Batard Show the other night, the green being the lush carpet adorning Parkview Field. Mike Ryan from the show was on hand. So were several hundred fans of the show, and also Mayor Tom Henry.

A good time was had by all, and the Fort won a few points in the Coolness Standings, proving to the world that, yes, We Get The Show.

This is the refrain every time some Sportsball bore complains that Le Batard, Stugotz and Co. don't stick to sports on their daily ESPN radio show, see. Someone dials up a sound bite, and there is Le Batard's dad, the delightful Papi,  saying reprovingly, "You don't get the show."

Lots of people don't. It's quirky, zany, occasionally stupid and only peripherally about sports. Which is what makes it a must listen for those of us who are devotees. We love it; the Stick To Sports dullards hate it.

I'm guessing they really would have hated what Le Batard did the other day.

Incited by Our Only Available President's racist go-back-to-Africa tweet at four Democratic congresswomen of color, and the way OOAP was conspicuously silent when his cultists chanted "Send her back! Send her back!" as he laid into one of them at a rally, Le Batard spoke truth to power. In so doing, he deliberately defied ESPN's implicit ban on "political" talk, and all but accused ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro, the architect of said ban, of complicity and cowardice.

An excerpt: “We here at ESPN haven’t had the stomach for that fight, because Jemele [Hill] did some things on Twitter and you saw what happened after that, and then here all of a sudden nobody talks politics on anything unless we can use one of these sports figures as a meat-shield in the most cowardly possible way to discuss these subjects ...

“We won’t talk about it unless Russell Wilson is saying something about it on his Instagram page. Then we have the power to run with it. Weak-ass shield. It is antithetical to what we should be, and if you’re not calling it abhorrent, obviously racist, dangerous rhetoric, you’re complicit.”

Strong stuff. And understandable in its passion, given that Le Batard is a second-generation Cuban-American; his father was one of the many who fled Castro's regime. So when Our Only Available President invited, along with three others, Somali-American immigrant Ilhan Omar to back where she came from, it undoubtedly hit home for him.

Calling out his bosses, of course, will certainly get him suspended, if not fired. And ESPN will look exactly as spineless and complicit as Le Batard accused it of being. Knuckling under to bigots and bullies is never a good look for a media entity in an allegedly democratic society, but ESPN did it when Jemele Hill called a spade a spade by labeling OOAP a white supremacist, and it will surely slap down Le Batard for doing the same thing.

But just as it didn't erase the truth of what Hill was saying, it won't with Le Batard, either. Fact is, sports and politics have always been intertwined, and never more so than today. When the President of the United States accuses Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players of "disrespecting" America because they took a knee to protest racial inequality, that is injecting politics into sports in the most basic way possible. Ditto the Vice-President walking out of a game when several players knelt, a completely orchestrated protest of the protest that was as nakedly political as it gets.

Both were specifically designed stratagems to play to the base by using sports. But Le Batard and others are supposed to Stick To Sports?

No one else does. Why should they?

And now, the No-pen Championship

The verities will always be verities, when you stand on the tee with a club in your hand. If you swing like Elaine Benes dances, your ball is going to take you to some interesting places. If you putt like you're using a garden hoe, your scoreboard is going to look like it lives on Wendy's triples.

And if you are a 43-year-old with a bad back?

Well. You're gonna be a 43-year-old with a bad back.

Which means you can take what Tiger Woods did at Augusta back in April, and preserve it under glass. He is that 43-year-old, you see, and because of that the magic is a dwindling resource. Maybe he can reach back the way he did in April occasionally, but the back isn't going to like it.

And so here the man was at Royal Portrush in the first round of the British Open, back to looking like a 43-year-old again. He winced when he hit the ball. The ball winced and generally made a beeline for the heather and the sand. And thus Tiger staggered in with a 78, tied for the third-worst round he's ever played in a major, hitting only eight fairways and little more than half the greens in regulation. And he didn't putt so hot, either.

This means we'll likely have just one more day of wall-to-wall What Did Tiger Do from the Tiger-besotted media, which will likely put a dent in the weekend ratings for the Open Championship. It will, however, be a cooling balm to all those who are frankly sick of All Tiger, All The Time. it will also inject a note of reality back into a discussion that sailed into zany flights of fancy after Augusta; in the two majors since, he's missed the cut (PGA) and tied for 21st (U.S. Open).

On the other hand, he wasn't the only guy Royal Portrush kicked around yesterday. It could have been worse. He could have been Rory McIlroy.

Northern Ireland's favorite son could scarcely have imagined a worse nightmare than what happened yesterday, in the first round of the first British Open to be played on McIlroy's home soil in 68 years. He opened with a quadruple bogey, and things just sort of traveled on their merry way from there. In the end, he brought it home with a 79, about ten light years off the lead and nowhere to be if you want to keep playing after today.

Imagine that: Rory McIlroy, a suburban Belfast boy, missing the cut in the British Open. In Northern Ireland.

It doesn't get much worse than that. Well, unless you're one-time world No. 1 David Duval, who shot a 91 yesterday. He took a 14 on one hole that included a two-stroke penalty for playing the wrong ball, and incurred another penalty for losing a ball.

Owie.

Today in asshat-ery

After three years of the Pampers Presidency, we should be used to grownups behaving like spoiled children. And then along comes a certain Chicago Cubs fan, who belies the accepted narrative that Cubs fans are all fun-loving souls who just want to come drink beer and hang out in their favorite summer resort, Wrigley Field.

Rather than, you know, steal from little kids like an enormous douche.

Courtesy of Deadspin, here is that certain Cubs fan, who goes by the name Mai Tai Guy, swooping in to snatch away Kyle Schwarber's walkoff home run from two small boys leaning over to get it. And then he wasn't even sorry about it, the asshat.

Just listen to him. Doesn't he sound exactly like the sort of bleephead who rounded off his night by going home and kicking a puppy around his crappy Hey Look I'm A Big Boy Now I Got Muh Own Place apartment?

Or perhaps his parents' basement.

The most disgusting part of this, and the most disheartening, is not Mai Tai Guy didn't see anything wrong with taking advantage of kids -- although, truthfully, it was like a grown man taking a 6-year-old to the tin in the driveway and then acting like he'd just posterized MJ. No, the worst part is, if you read the Deadspin post, there were actually a couple of staffers there who defended Mai Tai Guy.

Which only goes to show you that chivalry and accepted norms of behavior are apparently dead in America. Also that there are a lot of asshats out there these days.

A grand clash of ideas. Not..

So Joe Biden has challenged Our Only Available President to a push-up contest, and here is where our great American experiment waves the white flag. We are no longer the nation of Abe Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, debating slavery in Freeport, Ill. We are the Wide World of Sports.

Today on Wide World, it's the Presidential Arm-Wrestling World Championships, live from Petaluma, Calif. ...

Arm wrestling. Push-ups. Whatever, it's two geezers in their 70s trying to prove they're still manly men in front of an electorate whose reaction would likely be "The hell?"

 Because no matter how much Biden and Trump try to out-manly each other, the electorate has eyes. We know they're both decrepit old white guys. We know they're one missed blood pressure med away from shaking their bony fists and yelling at those damn kids to get off the lawn. No push-up contest -- or, say, a Pole Vaulting Death Match -- is going to change that.

In one corner, you've got a skinny 76-year-old who doesn't look a day over, um, 76. In the other, you've got a 73-year-old tubbo. Seriously, you could land planes on Trump's ass.

Seeing one of them out-push-up the other isn't going to change that. Though it would be fun to watch, and to imagine other mighty Feats of Youth and Strength in which they could indulge.

You know, like:

* Greco-Roman wrestling

Preferably in tights. OK, so no.

* Downhill skiing

Last one to fall and break a hip wins.

* One-on-one basketball

Make-it, take-it. Call your own fouls. Advantage Trump, who of course would never admit he committed a foul.

* The 100-yard dash

On second thought, no. Would take too long.

* Boxing

Advantage Biden. Trump docked numerous points for low blows.

Yeesh. Where, oh, where, is Lloyd Bridges when you need him?

A brief pause for homerism

Or, "Where can you find an honest man these days?"

I'll tell you: Pittsburgh.

("NO," you're saying. "NOT ANOTHER POST ABOUT YOUR LOSER PIRATES.")

Yes. Another post about my loser Pirates.

Who, first of all, did not lose last night, beating those degenerates from St. Louis 3-1. And who, second of all, are true and pure and honest, because something happened that hardly ever happens in baseball, and not at all in much of what passes for American life these days.

What happened was, Starling Marte got hit by a pitch in the fourth inning. And then refused to takes his base when the ump told him to take his base.

This is because he was not actually hit by the pitch.

No, sir. The pitch, it seems, hit the end of his bat. The ump missed the call. Marte, however, did not. And so even though he could have kept his mouth shut and taken his base -- I mean, the ump said he could, so why wouldn't he? -- he spoke up and said, uh, dude, the pitch didn't hit me.

Who does that? Especially in a day and age when getting away with whatever you can get away with has been practically raised to a national virtue?

So, kudos, Starling. And kudos to my Pirates.

And to the rest of you, this.

Moonstruck

The night Neil Armstrong walked on the moon I was in the bathroom, puking my guts out.

This is not because I had anything against Neil Armstrong, or NASA, or was made physically ill by the idea that there were actual homo sapiens out there who thought the whole thing was A Dang Old Gummint Lie. It is because I had appendicitis.

The docs yanked the little rascal out the next day. So I'll always associate the moon landing with throwing up a lot and then lying in a hospital bed with my lower abdomen on fire.

It's hardly the way I wanted to remember Apollo 11, which lifted off toward the grandest human achievement of the 20th century 50 years ago this morning. I was, after all, a space program nerd of the first order. I could rattle off the names of all seven Mercury astronauts, in the order they went up. The day the last of them, Gordo Cooper, went up, I stood out in our backyard looking up at the sky, hoping to see him pass over (I didn't).

I wanted to be Ed White, jetting around in space at the end of a shiny umbilical cord. I wanted to eat food out of tubes. I even liked Tang, because supposedly the astronauts drank it.

The last was probably more because I was a 10-year-old kid who'd eat anything. But, still.

Anyway ... the further we get away from what Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins began a half-a-century ago today, the more astounding and lucky and straight-up ballsy it seems. So I can understand, a little, why people with small minds still believe it never happened, that the whole thing was faked by shadowy forces who apparently had the technology to completely fool the entire world in 1969, but not the technology to actually go to the moon.

Polite society used to dismiss folks like this as "wingnuts" back in the day, but that was before the Supreme Wingnut occupied the White House, and rampant wingnuttery became mainstream thought in America. And so every interview with Buzz Aldrin or Michael Collins, the surviving Apollo 11 astronauts, is attended by comments from the usual suspects about how we're celebrating something that never happened and Buzz just keeps lying and that flag is clearly waving in the breeze and how can that be when there's no breeze on the moon and yada-yada-yada, blah-blah-blah.

My reaction to this is there are a lot of people out there who have seen this too many times. And who might want to finish with their comments, because they're late for their tinfoil-hat fitting.

That's because, if it's impossible for some to believe we pulled off the improbable in 1969, it's beyond impossible to believe the whole thing was a gigantic coverup. Somewhere close to half-a-million people worked on the Apollo 11 mission in some capacity or another. Yet they all kept the Great Coverup secret? In a nation that can't keep a secret about anything for five minutes?

Plus, Hollywood lighting experts will tell you it would have been impossible in 1969 to artificially create the moon lighting we see from the Apollo missions. And if you were going to fake the video of Armstrong stepping off the LEM, wouldn't you have used better production values? And how do you explain, if the moon missions were faked, the photos of the landing sites sent back from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2011? Or the fact that you can still bounce Earth-bound lasers off the retroreflector mirrors placed on the lunar surface by the astronauts?

None of this, of course, will make a dent in the wingnuts' narrative. That's the whole problem with conspiracy theories, see: They're a one-size-fits-all alternate universe where you can plausibly dismiss even the most established of facts.

Thus the moon landings never happened because all those half-a-million people are lying. And the Holocaust never happened because all the survivors of the camps, and every single serviceman who liberated them, made it all up. And can we really prove Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic in 1927? Or that Hillary didn't personally fly to Benghazi and kill those four American soldiers, just like she did Vince Foster?

On and on. You can't kill lunacy. All you can do is try to keep it down to a dull roar.

And so I will. And so, in four days time, I'll go outside, look up at the moon, and know that the footprints of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are still there, 50 years along.

Then I'll watch this again. God bless you, Buzz.

One for the ages

Stick this one in a time capsule, and seal that puppy up. Bury it deep beneath the threadbare grass of Centre Court. Seed these ancient grounds with it, along with Borg-McEnroe '80 and Ashe-Connors '75 and Federer-Nadal, '07 and '08, all the magnificent ghosts of finals past that hover so close here.

Djokovic-Federer '19 stands above them all, and that is not just prisoner-of-the-moment tunnel vision. That is fact.

In the end it was Joker winning his fifth Wimbledon over the indefatigable Fed, in five sets, the last going to 13-12. It lasted just shy of five hours, the longest Wimbledon final in history. Three of the five sets went to a tiebreaker. There were 68 games, 422 points, 35 aces.

And if it was Novak Djokovic lifting the trophy at the end, it was Roger Federer who made it heavy lifting. Less than a month shy of turning 38, he matched Joker stroke-for-stroke for five hours, scored more points overall, did things no almost-38-year-old has ever done. He was not the old dominant Federer, to be sure. He was only magnificent.

And he forced Djokovic to be magnificent, too. Together they achieved immortality, at least in such small matters as Wimbledon finals go.

Joker established himself as one of the greatest Wimbledon champions ever. And Federer?

Like Serena Williams the day before, he emerged beaten but undefeated, in the sense that there has never been anyone quite like him with a racket in his hand. Everyone remembers Jimmy Connors' lion-in-winter moment at the U.S. Open in 1991, when he reached the semifinals at the age of 39. But Connors lost in straight sets to Jim Courier in the semis, winning just eight games.

That was not this. That was not Federer pushing Djokovic to the bitter end in a Wimby final, forcing him to play a 25-points tiebreaker before finally ending a match that was more gasping survival than unalloyed triumph.

There may be more epic displays in Sportsball World this summer. But the bar is now set, and you can barely see it for the clouds

Ageless

Here is one headline you will see from Wimbledon this morning, on the day after Simona Halep played the match of her life to erase Serena Williams 6-2, 6-2 in 56 minutes in the women's final:

Serena Williams Loses Her 3rd Consecutive Grand Slam Final.

What that headline doesn't tell you is that Serena Williams is 37 years old.

What it also doesn't tell you is she stopped playing competitive tennis for awhile, had a baby, and then, in her mid-30s, launched a comeback, which never happens.

What it also doesn't tell you is, in spite of all that, she's still ranked 10th in the world. And, of course, has reached three consecutive Grand Slam singles finals, which you kind of have to do to lose them.

Three consecutive Grand Slam singles finals. At 37.

If she and Roger Federer -- who, at almost 38, plays Novak Djokovic for the men's title this morning, and is still one of the top three male players in the world -- are not the wonder of this or any other tennis age, it's hard to fathom who is. Because you want to know what some of Serena's predecessors were doing at her age?

Steffi Graf had been retired for seven years and was seven years past her last Grand Slam title.

Chris Evert had been retired for three years and was six years past her last Grand Slam singles title.

Billie Jean King was also six years past her last Grand Slam singles title, and Martina Navratilova was three years past her last Grand Slam singles title.

This would suggest, among many other things that would suggest it, that Serena Williams is the greatest women's tennis player of all time.

Suggests?

Shoot. It straight-up confirms it.

Cosmic

The Los Angeles Angels came home last night, and there was a whiff of the Beyond in it. It was their first home game since their teammate, Angels pitcher TylerSkaggs, was found dead in a hotel room in Houston, and they honored him in all the ways you honor someone taken so young and so abruptly.

His number, 45, was carved into the pitcher's mound. Every Angels player wore No. 45. And his mother, Debbie, threw out the first pitch.

Then things got, well, cosmic.

Maybe you don't believe in the Beyond, or that there is any consciousness or dimension beyond the human. Maybe you believe that when you die, you die, and all else is dust to dust.

But something was happening in that ballpark last night. Something.

To begin with, a couple of those guys wearing Tyler Skaggs' number, Taylor Cole and Felix Pena, stood out there on the mound Skaggs' so often occupied and pitched a no-hitter at the Seattle Mariners. It was the first Angels no-hitter in seven years, and the final score was 13-0.

Thirteen. Just like Skaggs' birthday, which is today, July 13.

But that was only the beginning of the weirdness.

Consider this: That no-hitter was also the first combined no-hitter in the state of California since the Baltimore Orioles no-hit the Oakland A's in Oakland. And the date that happened?

July 13, 1991.

The day Tyler Skaggs was born.

Pal-sy new world

So this, now, is the New NBA, whose logo should not be The Logo (i.e., Jerry West) any longer. The logo should be Batman and Robin in silhouette, or perhaps Ironman and Captain America. Or maybe Thor and the Hulk, uneasy allies though they may be.

Welcome to the Superfriends League, everyone!

In which we now have LeBron and AD teaming up on one side of L.A., and Kawhi and PG on the other. And Kyrie and (eventually) KD in Brooklyn. And now ...

And now, James Harden and Russell Westbrook. Together again, only in Houston and not Oklahoma City.

How the topography of the Superfriends League develops next season depends largely on just how Superfriendly the various Superfriends become. Chemistry, sociology and perhaps psychiatry will all play a role in this. Counseling services will be made available where needed.

Early analysis suggests Kawhi and Paul George will mesh best with one another, since both wanted to play together and engineered their deal specifically to make it happen. LeBron and AD might work out, too, although how both will work with Kyle Kuzma and whatever remnants the Lakers manage to scrape up to put around them remains to be seen.

They are the Lakers, after all, which promises a certain level of dysfunction. And they remain, as a franchise, subservient to the wishes and/or whims of LeBron. So we shall see.

Kyrie and KD in Brooklyn we'll not likely see until 2020, so until then it's Kyrie and KD's shadow presence on the bench as he heals up from the torn Achilles. And James and Russ down there in Houston?

The knee-jerk reaction is they'll need two basketballs to keep everyone happy, but probably not. Westbrook, after all, has averaged more than 10 assists per game the last four years, and led the league in that category the last two seasons. And the assist leader the year before that?

James Harden.

So, yeah, there will be some distribution, superficial appearances to the contrary.  And beyond that?

Well. You're just gonna have to wait. No spoilers here for this Marvel production.

Pound that Budweiser

Jim Bouton finally took his base the other day, all these crowded years after "Ball Four." He was 80 years old, a baseball man whom baseball despised for awhile, because he had the temerity to have a sense of humor about this child's game. This never goes over well with entities whose self-reverence is as ironclad as baseball's.

Bouton, who had one great season with the Yankees and then a lot of less-great seasons, wrote about the dopiness and absurdity and comic pettiness of our Great Pastime, at a time when that simply wasn't done. That his affection for the game in spite of everything was clearly evident was a subtlety the guardians of the game utterly missed.

Of course, viewed from almost half-a-century's distance, "Ball Four" emerges as less outrageous than charming, a quaint period piece that paints a portrait of a time irretrievably lost. Today players routinely tweet out clubhouse intimacies far more irreverent than any in Bouton's still-entertaining read. If he spawned the era of glasnost in baseball, it has become even more glasnost-y than even its creator could have imagined.

Though it likely amused him no end. As most things about the game did.

Sadly, this capacity was stolen from him in his twilight years. Bouton suffered a stroke in 2012, and in 2017 revealed he was suffering from dementia. And so a man whose recollections were notorious  succumbed to a pitiless thief of recollection, an irony almost too awful to contemplate.

He is free from that irony now, if you believe in a merciful afterlife. And so let's send him off with a proper benediction -- i.e., what the manager of the woeful Seattle Pilots, Joe Schultz, used to say to Bouton and the rest of his sadsacks when they actually fooled around and won a game.

"Attaway to stomp on ‘em, men," old Joe would say. "Pound that Budweiser into you and go get ‘em tomorrow.”

Indeed.

A brief pause for silliness

And now, because it's the heart of summer and the heat index here in Indiana is basically Dryer Vent, the Blob presents a sporting events appropriately feverish.

You've undoubtedly seen this already. But what could be more Summer Silly than a horse race entirely comprised of people dressed in tyrannosaurus rex costumes?

So, here it is, Blobophiles. I believe that is Secretarirex coming up fast on the outside. Or maybe it's T-Biscuit. And, look, isn't that Jurassic Pharoah going to the lead?

I see all sorts of fouling, going on, too. And probably some biting. But you know what they say.

All's fair in the Extinction Event Derby. Because the Derby ... finds a way.

A juicy dilemma

The American League beat the National League in the MLB All-Star Game last night,  which is not really news because the American League always beats the National League in the Midsummer Classic, or at least every year in the memory of anyone who didn't actually see Ty Cobb or Honus Wagner play in person.

Here's what is news, though: The final score was 4-3.

Also, there were only two home runs.

This qualifies as a 100-year drought for baseball these days, given that baseballs are jumping out of ballparks like startled deer. An unprecedented eruption of going yard has forced  commissioner Rob Manfred to answer some hard questions about whether or not MLB is doing some funny stuff with the equipment, and this week raised the ire of Astros pitcher Justin Verlander, who claimed it's not even a question.

The ball, Verlander complained, is juiced. They've wound it tighter than Montgomery Burns' purse strings, and injected it with flubber or something similar.

Of course, this could just be dismissed as the sour whining of a pitcher who he can't keep the aforementioned ball out of the seats. But Verlander does have a point.

Check his own numbers: In the four seasons preceding 2016, he gave up 19, 19, 18 and 13 dingers respectively. In the three full seasons since, batters have taken him for a ride 30, 27 and 28 times, a significant jump. And in one of those years, he was the American League Cy Young winner.

And this year?

He's 10-4 with a 2.98 ERA, which is why he was in the AL lineup last night. But in just half a season, he's already surrendered 26 homers.

So either something funny's going on with the baseball, or something funny is going on in batters' bloodstreams again. You'd like to think we're not on the cusp of another Steroids Era, but given that PED testing has always lagged behind PED development ...

Well. Who knows what magic beans are out there now. And who knows how much more zealously baseball would react than it did in the late '90s, when the last great Launch Era helped save baseball, artificially enhanced or not.

Because what was true then is true now. Remember that old Nike ad?

Aggrieved pitchers Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine down the in the bullpen, shouting "Hey! We've got Cy Young winners here!" as Mark McGwire wows a couple of young women with one bomb after another in the batting cage.

Cut to Glavine and Maddux pumping iron and bulking up.

Cut to both of them launching bombs in the batting cage, as another young woman calls out "Hi, Tom!"

"Chicks dig the long ball," says Maddux, trading forearm bumps with Glavine.

Chicks and everyone else, it seems.

Hence Verlander's claim. And hence all those thorny questions for Rob Manfred.

Tour de Blah

That Bicycle Race started up again over the weekend, though you might have missed it because A) you live in America, and B) nobody in America cares about it now that Lance Armstrong isn't cheating his ass off to win anymore.

Now it's just a bunch of guys named Gerant and Julian, as in "Julian Alaphilippe," who's the guy wearing the yellow jersey right now. This is a big deal, because Julian is French, and the last time a French rider wore the yellow jersey in That Bicycle Race (aka, the Tour de France) was five years ago. So hooray for France, and now the rest of us can go back to watching the All-Star Home Run Derby and the All-Star Game and summer league NBA basketball -- which is like regular NBA basketball only with rookies, G-League imports and Oh Yeah That One Guy.

This is a shame, frankly. And I think I know how to solve the problem.

Bring back the Tour de Syringe.

I'm semi-serious. I mean, how much more fun was it when Lance, sociopath that he is, was terrorizing anyone who dared tell the truth, which is that he was sticking needles in every available vein like everyone else in the sport? Remember the jingoistic outrage in America at all those dirty foreign journalists questioning Our Lance? Remember the intrigue, the backbiting, the sheer espionage of athletes sneaking vials of cheetah DNA (or some such thing) through airports and onto buses and past the drug police?

Gave the Tour a whole international-man-of-mystery vibe, all of that. There were heroes. There were villains. There were shady mad scientists sneaking God knows what sort of glow-in-the-dark drug cocktails to their "patients"; money and brown paper bags containing gorilla testosterone (or some such thing) changing hands in seedy hotel rooms; and of course Lance at the center of it all, presiding over his vast drug-fueled empire like Tony Montana.

Yeah, the sport was dirty as hell. But at least it was interesting.

I miss that. I miss Lance and his bottomless, venomous spite. I miss the way his defenders used to emulate him, pouring out abuse on anyone who even suggested it wasn't unreasonable to wonder how he was doing what he was doing. I miss the lying, the cheating, the mafia-like intimidation.

Now?

Now the big news is a Frenchman is wearing the yellow jersey. For now.

Zzzzzzz.

Vindication

The final rebuttal came in the 61st minute, when the woman  with the lavender hair stared down yet another crucible moment and made it blink. Megan Rapinoe's sixth and last goal of this women's World Cup was no less a statement than any of the other five, and yet it was. Because it was the last word in a World Cup of words, most of them brave and none of them subservient.

This fourth World Cup for the U.S. women was different in the way they're all different, in that this one was the final incarnation of the legacy begun 20 years ago in Los Angeles. When Brandi Chastain punched that final PK past the Chinese goalie, stripped off her jersey and knelt screaming for joy in the sun and that now-iconic black sports bra, it sent an unmistakable message to all those Mia/Brandi/Julie Foudy/Michelle Akers-worshipping girls.

Be bold. Be unconventional. Carve your own path and hang the consequences, because the consequences will never equal the rewards.

Twenty years later we have Rapinoe and a bunch of fierce women who have indeed carved their own path and let the consequences ride, and there have been some. They have been criticized for celebrating too raucously and displaying too much arrogance, even if it's exactly the sort of arrogance we admire in male champions. And Rapinoe has been slammed by the super-patriots for disrespecting the flag and the country and, I don't know, maybe apple pie, too, for doing something 90 percent of those criticizing her do -- i.e., not singing along with the suddenly hallowed National Anthem.

Seriously, try it sometime. Go to a sporting event and note how many people actually do sing who along with anthem. It ain't many, and they tend to mumble. It's what you do when you're not sure about the words.

Yet Rapinoe, because of who she is and what she so openly espouses, catches all manner of flak for not being "American." This includes flak from Our Only Available President -- whose own understanding of what it means to be an American, and whose understanding of his nation's history, is deeply flawed at best. If not entirely incoherent.

Rapinoe's response is that she is, in fact, uniquely American, and she is as right as ham on rye. She says what she thinks. She speaks truth to power. She says bleep, no, she's not goin' to the White House if the U.S. women win, because doing so would be serving as a political prop for a charlatan who opposes everything she is.

What could possibly be more American, more up-yours-King-George, than that?

And don't expect many of her teammates to go there, either. Why would they? Advancing the cause of an incorrigible misogynist (and probably worse)? Sharing a little grip-and-grin with a man who's hung out with, and perhaps shared the proclivities of, sexual deviants and general human scum like Jeff Epstein?

No wonder Rapinoe's teammate, Ali Krieger, says she refuses to respect OOAP. Because what exactly has he done to earn the respect of these progeny of Brandi Chastain and Co.?

And what have they done, for the fourth time, to earn anything but ours?

Battle for the Cellar. An update.

And now, because the Blob has been way too nice about it lately, it's time to check in with its favorite-yet-widely-reviled summer feature, the Battle for the Cellar -- aka, Who's Suckier Now, The Pirates Or The Reds?

("Nooooo! Why couldn't you just stay nice for once?" you're saying.)

'Cause it ain't my nature, Blobophiles. Besides, it's a cheap, easy post, and the Blob is semi on vacation.

In any case ... on with the update!

In which the Pirates (43-45) are wobbling along a game in front of the last-place Reds, who are 41-45. This means the Battle for the Cellar is white hot at the All-Star break, which is awesome because if weren't the Blob would have no reason to keep tormenting y'all with it.

Also, it's a good news/bad news situation, which is actually good news for the Pirates and Reds.

The bad news is they're still last and next-to-last in the NL Central.

The good news is the Pirates are only 3.5 games out of first, and the Reds are only 4.5 out of first. Which means they're both startlingly in the hunt even though it's past the Fourth of July.

Mostly this is because the entire NL Central is, well, startlingly lame. The Cubs are in first place, but they're only five games over .500. The Brewers are half-a-game behind, four games over .500. The  Cardinals are two games back -- which is where they likely would be even if they were down to Kelly Leak and a bunch of tee-ball recruits, on account of they're the Cardinals and you just can't get rid of the bastards.

Now, fans of the Cubs, Brewers and Cardinals are looking at this and probably concluding the reason none of them are much above .500 is because the division is intensely competitive. Hahahaha, good one. Truth is, the NL Central is the NL Stinktral. They're pretty much all cruddy-to-moderately-cruddy baseball teams.

Which means the Pirates and Reds still have a chance. Life is good.

Coast-to-coast toast

That was some shakin' goin' on out there in L.A., and we're not talking earthquakes. That swaying everyone felt in the Staples Center was the arrival of the NBA's new Superfriends team, Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, who decided L.A. was the place for them.

But not, you know, that L.A.

No, that L.A. -- the iconic Lakers, once one of the NBA's pillar franchises -- but the Clippers, aka the Comic Relief. Now the Clips are the stable grownup adept at adulating, and the Lake Show is the goofy child forever stumbling into some mess of its own creation.

Or to put it in old people terms, the Clips are Ward Cleaver now. The Lakers are the Beaver.

To be sure, they've got their own Superfriends -- LeBron and Anthony Davis -- but they had to give away most of their team to get them. LeBron and the bumbling Rob Pelinka had alienated most of them anyway, so perhaps it's no loss. Now they've got LeBron, Pelinka and a compliant Frank Vogel as coach.

You'd like to think this will work. But it's the Lakers, so ...

This of course is what we used to say about the Clippers, not to put too fine a point on it or anything. It's also what people used to say about the Knicks, although not for 20 or so years. Now what people say about the Knicks is "Hey, look! It's the new Nets!"

That's because the same seismic role reversal that's happening in L.A. is also happening in New York. The Nets, long the eclipsed afterthought in the Big Apple, are now the grownups. The Knicks are the dysfunctional child, forever smearing cereal in their hair and throwing the empty bowl on the floor.

Ostensibly they made a play for Kevin Durant, but KD said, "Oh, HELL, no."  Instead he decided he'd rather hang out across the river in Brooklyn. Worse, Kyrie Irving decided the same thing. And who could blame them, given the buffoonish James Dolan era in Madison Square Garden, where the Knicks haven't mattered for two decades?

Knicks fans like to pretend their team is still one of the linchpin franchises in the NBA, but more and more this just means they have an active fantasy life. Willis Reed, Walt Frazier and Dave DeBusschere didn't play for them yesterday. Neither did Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley and John Starks. They're the Sacramento Kings now, is who they are.

And playing in the Garden, in the heart of the media center of the world, doesn't have the juice it used to. It's 2019, and the world is a fully connected, live-streaming place. Everywhere is New York now.

In other words, you've got to actually work at it, in order to land the Kawhis and KDs and Kyries. You can't just say you're the Knicks or you're the Lakers and expect it to be the lure it used to be. Competence matters now, not just branding.

Especially when the brand you're selling is mostly just nostalgia these days.

Independence Day

... in which the Ungrateful Colonials, aka the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team, delivered yet another indignity to the Haughty Imperials, beating England 2-1 in the World Cup semis thanks to a fortuitously reversed English goal and a clutch stop by Alyssa Naeher on a British penalty kick.

And of course, the Ungrateful Colonials weren't even properly respectful about it, being the uncouth American rabble they are. After one USWNT goal, Alex Morgan was actually seen miming sipping tea! How cheeky! What arrogance! Like dumping that tea in Boston Harbor wasn't affront enough!

And that it happened on July 2, the actual date when Adams and the rest of the whining, loudmouthed lot signed that insufferable document, the "Declaration of Independence" ...

Well. The Brits were no doubt steaming. And especially about the independence part, because even on this side of the pond there's a segment of society that abhors the idea of independent women, particularly if those women exercise it in a manner men in particular don't agree with.

And, listen: The American women are nothing if not independent.

There is of course Megan Rapinoe, who sat out with a touchy hamstring and was unneeded in any case. She's exactly the sort of woman insecure men like, say, Our Only Available President loathe, because she has thoughts and expresses them and doesn't give a rip what men like OOAP think about it. That she's been the American star of this World Cup -- Captain America, if you will -- must particularly dig at OOAP and his ilk.

She leads a team that's fierce, talented and, shall we say, overflowing with confidence -- in other words, exactly the sort of qualities that make male athletes immortal icons. Which is to say, if Megan Rapinoe or Alex Morgan were a man, they'd be putting up statues of them.

Miming drinking tea, no doubt.

Generational summit

When it was done, she broke down and wept. This will happen when you're 15 years old and you look up, and here comes the poster on your bedroom wall walking toward you across the Wimbledon grass.

That was 39-year-old Venus Williams walking toward Cori “Coco” Gauff, and it was all too much, just too much. Generational moments don't often come so indelibly drawn, for one thing. And this one was drawn as boldly as any possibly could be drawn.

That a 15-year-old African-American girl would, at the high holy ground of their common world, be meeting the African-American woman who inspired an entire generation of young African-American women was magical enough. That she was doing it having beaten that inspiration at Wimbledon ...

Well. It was cosmic, sort of.

Here was Venus Williams, and here was Cori Gauff, who grew up idolizing her, and the former was the architect of her own defeat at the hands of the latter. Because without Venus and her sister Serena as guiding lights, would Cori Gauff even have been across the net from her? Would she ever have picked up a racket without watching Venus and Serena glide across the very same Wimbledon grass over which she now glides? Would she have ever dreamed of holding up that big ornate plate, had she not seen Venus and Serena hold it up so many times?

And so, yes, Cori Gauff wept Monday, overcme by the moment. At 15, she is the youngest person to qualify for Wimbledon in the professional era. At 15, she already has a 120 mph serve in her arsenal. It doesn't take much imagination to see her as, perhaps, the next great American tennis star.

This is how it works, you see. One generation comes along, grows up, grows old, leaves a legacy (if it's lucky) for the next generation to honor and advance.

 And so on. And so on.

Net(s) gain

Wait ... what?  The who, signed whom?

So much for the art of sleuthing by the basketball media, as the NBA's Silly Season -- aka, NBA free agency -- got down and got funky Sunday. All that talk about Kawhi and Kevin Durant teaming up to Superfriend y'all, and it was KD and Kyrie all along. Also D'Andre Jordan. And they went where?

No, not to the Knicks.  To those other guys, across the river from the NBA's seventh circle of hell.

The Nets!

Or, as a lot of folks no doubt punctuated it: The Nets?

Yes, the Nets, a storied franchise if the story is a three-page pamphlet. The last time the Nets were relevant, Julius Erving was playing for them. Also Billy "Whopper" Paultz, basketball immortal. Also the Taylors, Brian and Ollie, and a guy name John Williamson, and another guy named Bill Melchionni, another basketball immortal.

All of which should ease the fears of  the pearl-clutchers whose dire vision for the League is every free agent flocking to the glamour franchises. The Nets, after all, are no one's idea of a glamour franchise. What KD, Kyrie and D'Andre all winding up there demonstrates is that no scenario in the age of unrestricted free agency is either permanent or absolute, because motivations vary depending on circumstance.

When KD signed with Golden State, for instance, it was because he wanted rings. Now he's got a couple, so his motivation has changed. He wants a team all his own now, and the Nets were willing to pony up a max deal to give it to him.

And Kyrie?

Exactly the opposite. He went to Boston from Cleveland because he wanted to be The Man. Having discovered it wasn't all it was cracked up to be (and that he wasn't very good at it), he's back to being Robin again to someone else's Batman.

Robin, after all, is still a pretty sweet gig.

And lest anyone succumb to back-in-the-day nostalgia ("Back in the day, guys didn't chase rings and/or money the way they do now"), remember that nostalgia carries with it its own delusions. Which is to say, we tend remember things the way we want to remember them, and not necessarily the way they were.

This superteam craze, for instance, is nothing new. Fifty years ago, the Los Angeles Lakers swung a deal to bring Wilt Chamberlain to town, giving them a lineup with three future Hall of Famers (Wilt, Jerry West, Elgin Baylor). Mainly this was because they were sick of losing to the Celtics, and wanted a ring of their own -- which Wilt and Co. delivered in 1972.

And, same time frame, don't forget the Bucks trading for Oscar Robertson to pair with Kareem and deliver them a title. Which of course Oscar and Kareem did in '71.

Or how about Philly bringing aboard ABA superstars Erving and George McGinnis? Five years after the 76ers put up the worst season league history to that point, Dr. J and Big George got them to the NBA Finals, where they were upset by the Bill Walton Trail Blazers.

Same stuff. Different day.

The difference, of course, is one of execution, not motivation. The Lakers, the Bucks, the Sixers: Those mega-deals were engineered by management. Today they're engineered by the players, which is what really provokes all the hand-wringing. Whatever will become of a league where the players have a say in where they work?

Nothing that hasn't happened before, boys and girls.